Patrick Born .com

Sorry for the lack of updates. Feel free to follow me on tumblr.

www.patrickborn.tumblr.com

So a month or two ago, I was on an energy drink kick trying different Energy Drinks. I noticed WaWa had their own Energy Drink. It was 50 cents cheaper than the brand name energy drink. I figured I’d try it because of the price difference. Plus I figured it has the same stuff as other energy drinks. I was so wrong. The back of the can has a footnote that reads Allergy Contains Shellfish. I keep my diet kosher and don’t do shellfish or pork so I immediately threw away half my energy drink. The thought of Shellfish in an energy drink intrigued my coworker Trey enough to give a visual of how one might get shellfish into an energy drink. This visual birthed a comic based on the situation from my other coworker Phil. This now means I’m internet famous.

This is a couple weeks old, but I’m loving the new jeremycowart.com. I’ve used a few of the abstracts as wallpapers recently.

At my job we do a ton of forms. Pages and pages of forms. We also like to roll with the web standards crowd. In order to make our forms more semantic and accessible we tried many different ways of marking up our forms. In this pursuit of the holy semantic form grail we have run into the inflexible nature of legends. Since we use so many form elements, we find it necessary to use many fieldsets to divide the sets of forms. We had a legend for each fieldset, but early on we would just hide our legends and use h4s or h3s to do an over heading for a fieldset. My first thought is if we’re hiding legends, then why would we even use them. So we moved more toward using the legends and not using the h3s or h4s as heading for the fieldsets. The only problem is that legends are great if you want them styled very similar on every project, but they aren’t flexible across browsers and don’t allow for graceful use of sifr if needed.

So this has left me thinking, would it be horrible if I ditched the legends for the time being and used a combination of fieldsets and headers with no legends? Pages still validate in xhtml if you have fieldsets without legends. What are your thoughts?

Here’s another rap video from the rap show I had at my house this past weekend.

I had a rap show last night at my house with sintax.the.terrific performing. I’ve posted one of the songs below.

Podcasts

Itunes Podcasts - SXSW.com Podcasts

Slides

• Mobile Web Presentation
• Web Typography Sucks
• Accessify
• Turning Internet Projects Into Revenue Generating Businesses
• Grids are Good
• Why XSLT is Sexy

Notes

• High Class and Low Class Web Design
• Summary of Many Panels

Distractions

• Congress Street “Bat” Brigade

I am very thankful that I had the oportunity to go to SXSW. It is a truly an honor to spend the week with such brilliant minds. My week was filled with about about 20 panels on everything from Design to Microformats. It was quite inspiring to hear other people talk about techniques and ideas that they have implemented in their workplace.

The two panels that stand out to me the most are Web Typography Sucks and Microformats. I was very impressed with the way the Microformats people keep their process clean. The Typography session gave good examples of how to set well paced typography for the web.

I hope to return next year.

I’m getting some good photos here at sxsw you can check them out at my flickr photostream.  I’ll have my thoughts on sxsw soon. The weather in austin is great.  I plan on taking it home with me.

Above is a photo taken by bkmcae on flickr. This is a photo of board in the bridge out to the middle of the Jame’s replace by an engrave peice of metal that a has a quote from someone during the seize of Richmond during the Civil War. There are several of them along this bridge.

My Idea would be to have something similar on the higher part of a wall in my house with and inspirational Quote or Scripture on it. I really liked the look of the letters in metal.

2 posts in one day. Who can handle it?